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Monthly Archives: December 2013

Despite its shaky foundations, quantum mechanics is extraordinarily successful. In fact you’d be hard pushed to find a more successful scientific theory. It can predict all kinds of phenomena with amazing precision, from the colours of grass and sky to the transparency of glass, the way enzymes work and how the Sun shines.

This is because it is largely a technique: a set of procedures for calculating what properties substances ought to have based on the positions and energies of their constituent subatomic particles. The calculations are hard. For anything more complicated than a hydrogen atom, it is necessary to make simplifications and approximations. But we can do that very reliably – and so the vast majority of physicists, chemists and engineers who use quantum theory today don’t need to go to conferences on the nature of reality. They can do their job perfectly well if, in the words of the physicist David Mermin, they just ‘shut up and calculate’.

Young Hugh Everett agreed with much of what the highly respectedphysicistNiels Bohr had suggested about the quantum world. He agreed with the idea of superposition, as well as with the notion of wave functions. But Everett disagreed with Bohr in one vital respect.

To Everett, measuring a quantum object does not force it into one comprehensible state or another. Instead, a measurement taken of a quantum object causes an actual split in the universe.

Rather than a straight line showing noteworthy events progressing onward, a time line based on the Many-Worlds interpretation would show each possible outcome of each action taken. From there, each possible outcome of the actions taken (as a result of the original outcome) would be further chronicled.

But a person cannot be aware of his other selves — or even his death — that exist in parallel universes. So how could we ever know if the Many-Worlds theory is correct? Assurance that the interpretation is theoretically possible came in the late 1990s from athought experiment— an imagined experiment used to theoretically prove or disprove an idea — called quantum suicide. weird !!!!